


planning to move on, but you're still standing there

by cloudydragon



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Full Game Spoilers, M/M, Unrequited Love, also me: writes a fic about ouma's massive control issues, me: i hate ouma, so did anyone else find his FTEs really fucked up or was it just me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 21:55:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12735084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudydragon/pseuds/cloudydragon
Summary: Trust doesn't get you results. Trust won't get you what you need.(No amount of murders can drum a single concept that you've known all your life into your poor, stupid, doomed classmates. Trust ends up with people dead.)





	planning to move on, but you're still standing there

If someone, afterwards, knowing the why, had asked you how you did it, you'd tell them that you throw yourself headfirst into everything you do, that you never bother containing any of your reactions to everything that happens. A pang of sadness is enough for you to erupt into tears, small indignities can make you explode with anger, the littlest victories (and it has to be, when you're scrabbling for whatever advantage you can get in this killing game) igniting maniac laughter. In that singular moment, everything you feel is real, projected larger than life on the screen that is your face and body.  

In some ways you are just as uncivilized as Gonta, gone back to your basest roots. It is funny, then, that they love him and that they hate you.

 

Another thing you’ve always understood, another thing that your remaining classmates don’t get, is that you are only at your most powerful when you can choose when to let everything go. Once you're capable of sacrificing every unreliable pawn on the board - then, finally, you'll be limitless. 

Iruma, turning away from you. Gonta, wild-eyed, a hairsbreadth away from lunging bare-handed at an Exisal. It is clear as day how someone could use them, and the window to act is closing fast.

(Shinguuji would have seen them both - well, not Iruma, probably - as different aspects of the beauty of humanity. You see it as the opportunity to tie up loose ends.) 

Saihara comes to visit you, at some point during your planning. Your game ends rather anticlimactically with Saihara clucking over your wounds like a particularly goth mother hen, but as you suspected you aren't disappointed at all by his reaction when you tell him you've stolen his heart. You want to tell Saihara what you've planned right there, just so you could see the same look that passed over his face one more time - confusion, acceptance, and then finally the understanding that makes you feel dissected and lit-up as a electric wire under his gaze. 

You don't tell him, of course. At the time you are stupidly, ridiculously glad that Saihara at least will never know how deep you're in, and even you are not sure whether it's because he could be the mastermind or because after what you've planned he could never, ever, turn away from you, not even if he wanted to, even if it's not the way you want him to look at you.

 

So: you take Gonta out into the woods. You watch dispassionately as Iruma dies, her avatar's frantic struggling ugly to the last. You watch as Momota wraps his broad arm around Saihara's thin shoulders and don't bother holding back the irritation that boils within you, hot and familiar since Akamatsu hung. You face the Ultimate Detective head-on in the class trial, all the while thinking, _look at me, look at me, look at me_.  

(It is, as always, too much to ask for, that he'd look past all your lies to see the truth. Your plan relies on him not seeing, in fact. It doesn't stop the gaping emptiness when he tells you, steady and certain, that you don’t have anyone and you never will, and you know what he means; _one day you'll die alone._ )

Afterwards, you’ll wonder at how Saihara Shuuichi, who tries so hard not to hurt with his words, was driven to a cruel truth just for you. By rights you should feel triumphant for being the first person to provoke righteousness out of him, but it sours when you recall that his eyes were not on you even then, instead flickering to a panting Momota and a dark-eyed Harukawa leaning against each other in a corner. It doesn’t count: it is not a victory that you won. 

 

You have a lot of time to think, in the interim. The Exisal hold is silent and cavernous and also soundproofed, so you don't even get the opportunity to laugh at Momota pacing indignantly, your very own princess locked in a castle. Whenever you drop in to give him food and painkillers he just glares at you, silent and wary. 

The mastermind is powerless. The game is over. You press your palms into your temples, and wonder where your triumph is. There is no one to speak to, which is the problem. It hardly mattered if you were disgusted at yourself before, useful if anything: if you reflected that disgust on your face, everyone assumed you were laughing at them, not at yourself. A mirror reflected in another mirror is nothing at all.

You wonder what Saihara would say, if he was here. Probably he would insist on continuing your last conversation, or if not he would want the answer to the same question everyone asks you eventually. _Why do you lie so much?_

You dangle your legs down from where you sit high above the control panel. Saihara will never enter this room, and so it is safe for you to imagine him looking up at you, his ever-worried face lit up with genuine curiosity for once.

You want to tell Saihara that it is not the lie itself that bothers you: it is the lack of consistency, in blaming the falsehood. How easy it is for a supposed truth to change. Emotions are labile anyway, a declaration of love just as quick to change to hate. Saihara would understand, at this point - how his face had blanched, as it took in Momota's naked betrayal.  _I thought you were on my side, Shuuichi_. 

 _Why are you telling me this?_  Imaginary Saihara asks, though you don't fool yourself for a moment that he would ever really say it. It is only that you have wondered it so many times before as well. _Why am I so special?_

The answer is: it is so _easy_ , to sway with your lies. Your minions understood, and those who knew DICE's true power were wary of you, but here so few people even try to look past that first layer of deception. You barely even had to try to fool them. You know it's made you cruel - careless, in the neverending game you play of how much you can get away with.

The difference is that when Saihara looks at you, it makes you want to try harder. The possibility that you might not be able to fool him one day keeps you hanging on, a fish on a deadly lure. Moreover, you don't know whether you _want_ to be able to fool him. The longer you know Saihara Shuuichi, there's always that pull to just give in, give him what he wants, if only he'll let you get closer. The only thing that stopped you the last time was that doing so would have meant the end of you.

 _Are you sorry?_ Saihara asks, but it's not him, it's Gonta with a scorched face and his chest burnt clean through, holding out his hand up to you.  _Are you sorry for what you did?_

 

The truth is that you really aren't. You slide your fingers down your eyelids, and when you look down the figure is gone.

You shouldn't be waiting here, sulking for someone that won't come - that ship sailed a long time ago, even before Iruma thought up a plan to kill you. It all ended as soon as you saw Amami's body sprawled amongst the bookcases, when the real mastermind announced that the killing game had began. 

You steeple your fingers, and go to find a pen. You need to plan for the rest of the end of the world. 


End file.
